I continue to get very good questions about all sorts of things we deal with on the blog.  Here are a few that have come in recently.

QUESTION:

In a recent episode of your Misquoting Jesus Podcast I understood you to say that despite many errors and contradictions in the bible no doctrine is affected because it can always be found elsewhere in the text. I always believed that this was in fact not the case regarding the Trinity. If 1 John 5:7-8 does not truly belong in scripture, as I have heard claimed, I thought that there is no other place where Father, Son and Spirit are said to be One. Please can you put me right on this.

RESPONSE:

Ah, I wasn’t referring to errors and contradictions in the Bible, but to textual changes made by scribes.  No one change of any scribe has a decisive effect on any major Christian doctrine.  That’s because doctrines are never based simply on one verse or another, but on an entire sweep of biblical passages and theological reasoning.

To that end:  scribes did indeed add the explicit statement of the doctrine of the trinity in 1 John 5:7-8 — it wasn’t in 1 John as originally written.  But

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